This article is part of Dissent’s special issue of “Arguments on the Left.” To read its counterpart, by Susan Jacoby, click here.

As the culture wars of the last several decades unfolded, religion seemed to loom over every aspect of American life. Would public schools host class-wide prayers, teach intelligent design, and require daily deference to the American flag? Would television shows deal frankly with sexuality, abortion, and unconventional families? Would Americans find hope and vitality in an increasingly secular, progressive future, or in an idealized Christian past? Today, as the fog of this protracted cultural struggle clears, it appears that religion—specifically Christianity—was itself contested, rather than merely serving as the moral bulwark of one particular side.

This is because, as historian Kevin Kruse points out in his recent book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,co-opting the rhetoric and symbols of Christianity was useful for American capitalists, at least for a time. The result of this unhappy marriage was the Christo-capitalism of the modern Christian right, a species of American conservatism that left a bitter taste in the mouths of leftists. But if this is all that remains of the legacy of Christian politics in America, it will be an affront both to Christianity and to leftism.

Viewing the relationship between Christianity and leftism as inherently antagonistic is firstly a disservice to history. Despite the efforts of the business leaders who conquered Christian thought during the Great Depression, American Christians have never supported capitalist domination of governance or of society. Consider, for instance, a recent study by historian Heath Carter of the Christian roots of labor union organizing in Chicago during the Gilded Age. In Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, Carter recovers what has been lost to the rhetoric of the Christian right, namely that Christianity (even its evangelical iterations) aligns very well with the goals of organizers fighting for justice and dignity in their work. Indeed, America’s labor movement has long enjoyed support from Christianity of all stripes, from the Catholicism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, to the peace-oriented Protestantism of A.J. Muste and the Society of Friends.

Outside of labor organizing, Christian theology has also influenced other leftist social movements, such as black power in the United States and liberation theology in Latin America. American civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked this theology of liberation to agitate not only for racial justice, but for equality everywhere and for everyone, including in the sphere of economics. Today, the same line of reasoning is evident in the words and writings of Pope Francis, who has added environmental concerns to the issues we must address so that all can flourish equally.

Christianity, in other words, is no more destined for a cozy relationship with neoliberal, free-market politics than any other ideology, and perhaps less so, given its longstanding interest in the poor. The fact that Christianity is reflexively associated with conservatism in the United States is not so much an accident of history as it is a concerted effort on the part of vested, moneyed interests. Still, making a bad match for American conservatism doesn’t necessarily mean that Christian thought is overly inclined to a pure, secular leftism: indeed, there will always be tensions between Christian doctrine and the tendencies of left political action when it comes to social issues like the family, sexuality, and fertility. The values of an orthodox Christian leftist in these matters will undoubtedly differ from those of a secular leftist. But there are two reasons why Christians should remain an important left contingent, and a valuable resource for the left. First, because the kind of mass politics necessary to achieve left goals will rely in part on reaching the world’s approximately 2 billion Christians. Second, because Christianity can help challenge reigning neoliberal views on property, poverty, and the role of government.

Consider, for example, Pope Francis’s Laudato Si, an encyclical released in May to respond to growing ecological crises worldwide. In Laudato, Francis writes that “[t]he principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.” He then goes on to note “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.” Francis is exactly right: since the earliest writings of Christianity, theologians have held that property should support human flourishing, not impede it. Property comes, in other words, with what Pope John Paul II called a social mortgage—a due owed to the remainder of humanity for privatizing a piece of creation that was made for all to enjoy.

The implications for Christian politics based on this observation are massive, especially because so much of liberal political logic hinges on the inviolability of property rights, and the conception of the self as a kind of property. It is difficult to challenge the valuation of property rights over life and, more importantly, human need, from within a heavily property-focused liberal framework. And because virtually all American political rhetoric is caught between two liberal poles, most of our political discourse also seems incapable of making the sharp critiques of liberal thought that we so urgently need.

But Christianity, in part because of its long pre-liberal history, remains a valuable wellspring of such criticism. Pope Francis can criticize liberal property theory and its impact on government (consider conservatives who view taxation for public spending as de facto theft, and therefore immoral) precisely because Christian theories of property and governance emerged long before liberal ones, and conceptualize value in radically different ways.

And because Christianity is still practiced by large swathes of people both inside and outside the United States, these critiques are still deeply meaningful to many, and embody values and truths they hold most dear. This means that, along with providing a program for left political action, Christianity also imbues it with passion, which has been as much a driving factor in America’s anti-oppression movements as the theories on which they’re based. The Christian legacy for left politics, especially today, is therefore one worth fighting for.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig is a staff writer at The New Republic.

This article is part of Dissent’s special issue of “Arguments on the Left.” To read its counterpart, by Susan Jacoby, click here.

Austin Frerick, who launched a bid for Iowa’s third congressional district on an antimonopoly platform, dropped out when party leaders made it clear that they preferred his better-funded opponents. Photo courtesy of Austin Frerick.

Early voting locations in the Indianapolis metro area in 2016, via IndyStar.

An Eritrean refugee in Khartoum. Photo by John Power.

Common migration routes from East Africa to Europe. Route information adapted from the International Organization for Migration, August 2015, by Colin Kinniburgh. Countries party to the Khartoum process are shaded in orange (note: not all shown on this map).

Khartoum as seen from the river Nile. Photo by John Power.

At the 1936 International Conference of Business Cycle Institutes, sponsored by the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, Vienna. Ludwig von Mises is seated in the center with mustache and cigarette. Gottfried Haberler also pictured, at right. (Source)

The Democrats are in the throes of a remaking.

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Sketch for a 1976 poster by the New York Wages for Housework Committee (MayDay Rooms / Creative Commons)

In 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat from Nebraska, ran for president on a fusion ticket with the Populist Party. This cartoonist from a Republican magazine thought the “Popocratic” ticket was too ideologically mismatched to win. Bryan did lose, but his campaign, the first of three he waged for the White House, transformed the Democrats into an anti-corporate, pro-labor party. Cartoon from Judge (1896) via Library of Congress

Political strategist Jessica Byrd. Courtesy of Three Points Strategies.

Stacey Abrams, Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia. Photo courtesy of David Kidd/Governing.

A drawing made for the author by a five-year-old girl in detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Courtesy of Nara Milanich)

A drawing made for the author by a five-year-old girl in detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Courtesy of Nara Milanich)

A drawing made for the author by a five-year-old girl in detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Courtesy of Nara Milanich)

In a scene from HBO’s The Deuce, streetwalker Ruby presents an officer with a property voucher to avoid arrest. Courtesy of HBO.

The Kurds

[W]hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. . . right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. Actually almost opposite to each other. —Dilar Dirik, “Rojava vs. the World,” February 2015

The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights.

Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both clan-based and patriarchal.

Turkey: For much of its modern history, Turkey has pursued a policy of forced assimilation towards its minority peoples; this policy is particularly stringent in the case of the Kurds—until recently referred to as the “mountain Turks”—who make up 20 percent of the total population. The policy has included forced population transfers; a ban on use of the Kurdish language, costume, music, festivals, and names; and extreme repression of any attempt at resistance. Large revolts were suppressed in 1925, 1930, and 1938, and the repression escalated with the formation of the PKK as a national liberation party, resulting in civil war in the Kurdish region from 1984 to 1999.

Syria: Kurds make up perhaps 15 percent of the population and live mostly in the northeastern part of Syria. In 1962, after Syria was declared an Arab republic, a large number of Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and declared aliens, which made it impossible for them to get an education, jobs, or any public benefits. Their land was given to Arabs. The PYD was founded in 2003 and immediately banned; its members were jailed and murdered, and a Kurdish uprising in Qamishli was met with severe military violence by the regime. When the uprising against Bashar al Assad began as part of the Arab Spring, Kurds participated, but after 2012, when they captured Kobani from the Syrian army, they withdrew most of their energy from the war against Assad in order to set up a liberated area. For this reason, some other parts of the Syrian resistance consider them Assad’s allies. The Kurds in turn cite examples of discrimination against them within the opposition.